Scream Like a Baby

Over a long, discursive interview that he gave the NME in the summer of 1980, Bowie remembered the future. He regretted that he never had the time and the finances to mount a Diamond Dogs musical/film, for which he had even designed set models. While admitting that his scenario had dated, Bowie thought the Diamond Dogs world of feral punk kids roller-skating around ruined cities (because there was no more fuel/cars left) was still a more credible near-future than the one being romanticized by Gary Numan and the Human League: a future of sentient cars and robotic men, of dreams of wires. “The kleen-machine future,” as the interviewer Angus MacKinnon called it. A false myth, Bowie said, one perpetuated by television, politicians and advertisers.

“I don’t believe in this hi-tech society at all,” Bowie said on his promo disc for Scary Monsters. “I don’t believe it exists: I think it’s a great myth…on a very emotional, people level one foresees [the future] instead becoming more terrifyingly real, anti-tech. The old symbolic street fighting thing probably won’t be as symbolic as it once was, but will become a reality. One can foresee it in the dreadful Eighties.”

Bowie, a product of the Sixties in many ways, had never been a Utopian. His early Buddhist leanings had led him to regard time and history as being cyclic, having no real progression, just the occasional strain of coherence set against a backdrop of entropic decay. His proposed futures were generally cataclysms: inter-generational war, neo-fascists, Big Brothers, nuclear holocausts; the only potential liberation came from his Buddhist superhero figures (“Karma Man,” “Wild Eyed Boy From Freecloud”) that later evolved into Ziggy Stardust. They only delayed the inevitable. At the end of “Freecloud,” a town lies in ruins; Ziggy either kills himself or is torn apart by his fans.

Now here he was in 1980, a year that Bowie had half-expected never to come. No matter—he doubled down with “Scream Like a Baby,” a brutal near-future SF song that could have come off The Man Who Sold The World. It seems in part a rebuke to Gary Numan, who, as Bowie told the NME, had spent much of his career remaking “Saviour Machine” (“he’s confined himself terrifically,” Bowie said of Numan, the dagger neatly sliding in). “Scream Like a Baby” also calls back to “All the Madmen,” with its narrator being institutionalized and civilized by force.

The lyric’s fractured storyline—gays and other “undesirables” clubbed off the streets, sent into reeducation camps, drugged, brainwashed and, in some cases, killed—was a common scenario of the time: there was a chill in the air, some almost willing the repression to come. “Scream Like a Baby” could be set in the London of Alan Moore’s near-contemporary V for Vendetta, with its post-nuclear-war fascist Britain that has dispatched its minorities and troublemakers via concentration camps. Both also echo the paranoid early hip-hop classic, Brother D with Collective Effort’s “How We Gonna Make the Black Nation Rise?”* Brother D is a Cassandra in a disco, grabbing people at a party, breaking up dances, ranting about genocide: “they’re killing us in the street,” “it ain’t no party in a police state,” “America’s got concentration camps,” “the ovens may be hot by the break of dawn,” “the party may end one day soon, when they round the niggers up in the afternoon.”

“Scream Like a Baby” is a remake of “I Am a Laser,” a song that Bowie wrote for his would-be soul trio, the Astronettes. The original idea was just to do a straight revival of the song, which Tony Visconti was familiar with, having helped arrange the original. “Laser” was the best Astronettes composition, with its soaring chorus and swaggering lyric, and Bowie kept most of the original structure, only expanding the bridge by a few bars.

Visconti liked the song in part because, being an older piece, it had one of Bowie’s brilliantly chaotic chord progressions. The verses are built of two clusters of three chords (Cm-Abj7-G7 (e.g., “and I hide under blankets“) and Bb-Ab6-Eb (“and I mixed with other colors“)), two descending progressions in the key of E flat. The verses are two repeats of each progression, then repeated. The refrain, however, while starting on E-flat, builds to a major chord resolution, while the six-bar bridge is a run of augmented (+) and diminished (°) chords, some of which have no relation to the home key—Gm7/sus4, C#dim7, F5+, C#°, Gm9, Gm7+. It adds to the dissonance fueled by Bowie’s varisped vocals.

On much of Scary Monsters, Bowie strategically used choruses and distorted vocal overdubs to shadow or submerge his voice. There’s often the sense that the singer is being undermined by someone else—a conscience, a secret narrator. One repeated trick was having the backing vocal track be off-beat and mixed low, murmuring back the lead vocal’s lines (it’s used to great effect in “Ashes to Ashes”).

In the bridge of “Scream Like a Baby,” starting at 2:39, Bowie’s two vocal tracks, singing the same lines and divided in the left and right channels, are gradually separated as Visconti speeds up one track while slowing down the other. It’s a schizophrenic breakdown, and suggests the “Sam” that the singer laments could well be himself, a liberating figure that’s actually a splintered piece of the singer’s personality, one eventually snuffed out by his treatment. It’s why the rousing Astronettes chorus, originally intended to be a spotlight for Ava Cherry, still fits—the singer’s idealizing Sam, whoever he really is, and it makes the return of the “Laughing Gnome” descending progression (on Andy Clark’s synthesizer) before the chorus seem even more ominous. (It’s accompanied on the second round by Bowie’s stammered, never-completed “so-cie-ty.”)

Of course, the time of “Cars” and Scary Monsters and V for Vendetta is as far away from us today as the Korean War was to them. Which future won out? You could argue that Numan got it right after all, that the world of 2011, with its blurriness between virtual and actual reality, the omnipresence of machines, seems to be his. But Bowie’s counter-future, a scrabbling, debased world of street fighting, of organized fear and brute force, isn’t that far beneath it. “Scream Like a Baby” seems frantic and dated, or it still just may be too early.

Recorded February 1980, Power Station NYC; April 1980, Good Earth Studios, London. Released as the B-side of “Fashion,” October 1980. Rehearsed for, but not performed in, the Glass Spider tour of 1987.

* Brother D was Daryl Aamaa Nubyahn, a Brooklyn math teacher/activist who recorded, with the Collective Effort, for the Clappers label in 1980. In a mild contrast to other record labels, Clappers was founded as a Maoist effort.

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46 Responses to Scream Like a Baby

I find the differences in the lyrics between the earlier take and the finished track interesting. Always been a favourite of mine this song – it’s so over the top. Dystopian on a personal level, deep and scary (he got hat title right). Great write-up!

Love this song. Great to hear I Am Laser, which I haven’t had a chance to listen to before. I love the relative simplicity of this recording compared to the final version on Scary Monsters.
This just is a very strong song, whichever version of it you listen to, really. Interesting to see how long it took for it to get on an official record, shows you what a…potent…songwriter/musician Bowie really was in the 70’s.

An impressive article. I do wish though that Numan had a writer-fans who could make his case better. He’s so much more than a Bowie wannabe. Are Friends Electric? is the musical masterpiece of that era.

Scary Monsters seems to me to be the midpoint of his strategy of recycling himself, which worked well enought to begin with but had increasingly diminishing returns. On Lodger he remakes Sister Midnight, and has two other songs with the same chord structure. On Scary Monsters he remakes two old songs (one of which he also uses as a reprise), does a cover, and also has a song that references a previous hit. Three years later, Let’s Dance has only five songs that hadn’t already appeared in some form or other. (Five songs in three years – from the man who recorded the bulk of Diamond Dogs in three days!) And of course the less said about Tonight the better…

I remember making pretty much the same point to a Bowie-bore friend not so long ago. However, one of the things I’ve learnt from this series is just how consistent Bowie has been in recycling and reworking stuff that he didn’t nail first time round. Right from the beginning. Things like lifting a vocal melody from Ching-a-ling and rehashing it on Saviour Machine don’t seem backward looking, because it is such an obvious improvement. If you go through the ‘classic’ Bowie albums (Space Oddity – Let’s Dance), it’s only on Heroes and Station to Station that he doesn’t try to rework something he has recorded before in another form. For someone supposedly who has always presented himself as moving forward, Bowie has kept a very keen eye on his back catalogue.

Even though I’m not a fan of Gary Numan (I listen to a couple of his songs from the late 70’s but that’s it) I always thought Bowie was especially mean to him, uncharasterically so for him. Or at least for my perception of him. I wonder if they ever had a personal encounter that somehow pissed off Bowie…(since Numan said his Asperger’s syndrome made him appear arrogant/rude)? It’s not like Numan was the only Bowie-inspired artist at that time, and he was hardly a clone.
Oh well, nobody’s perfect, right.
I wonder if Bowie ever felt any remorse for being so harsh on Numan, esp. after the Asperger’s reveal.

But I won’t lie I find reading Bowie’s put-downs of Numan very amusing.

According to Numan, and it can be found in his autobiography, there was a particular incident when filming for the end of 1979 Kenny Everett show, where both he and Bowie were scheduled to appear – in the end, Numan’s view is that Bowie got him taken off – the Numan contribution, ‘I Die: You Die’ was shown on a later programme.

Always thought of scream as a lesser relative to cygnet committee , quicksand and obviously bewley bros with its shadowy authority figures and insanity etc. I was unaware of the astronettes version till I found a bootleg with the sessions on recently. Bowie is amazing the way he sees something to recyle in such a non event original. I suppose songwriters constantly rehash past efforts.

Many of the most successful songwriters both recycle their own tunes and lyrics and indeed when they start those of others. In Bowie’s case the process of integration especially in the early years is laid out as his influences are all too apparent. He reached a sort of sweet spot between 71 and 77 in which the process of songwriting of combining or montaging all the different ingredients became almost effortless ( though the studio out takes suggest is wasn’t always seamless), From 78 onwards the process becomes more laboured and he gradually looses his touch and he begins to start to repeat himself rather than blend the elements to create something new.

Yes, I’d say this is about right although I’d put the effortless period at ’71 to ’75. He was straining by the time of Station To Station – only five original compositions, all stretched to their limits. Eno and Berlin were (highly successful) ways of deflecting the problem for a while, which reappears with Lodger.

Very good point well made. On the point of ‘repeating himself rather than creating something new’ after around 1978, isn’t that a charge that could be leveled at mainstream pop music in general? I have a feeling you made a similar point quite a long way back. (Apologies if it wasn’t you.)

I don,t have problem with the recycling, all artists do it ..let’s face it the stones have been doing it for donkeys years. If Bowie wrote something years ago he has every right to dredge it up and re-use or re-write. As long as it is relevant to the other material it accompanies. I don,t personally think in this collection he was struggling coming up with material. I think your missing the point with Station to station it contained 6 songs of such quality and epic feel that if anything of lesser quality had been included it would have detracted. I think the main prob with his later work is he is not as on the ball with editing out weak stuff. He should have extended some of the tunes here and let em roll on longer.

I agree with you DD, all artists recycle – it’s part of the creative process and we’re all better off for it (because we get the end results!). It doesn’t mean that someone like Bowie is looking backwards and that’s bad because he’s all about going forwards and changing – it’s just a process. It’s hard to keep being brilliant and Bowie kept it up for much longer than most artists – I am very forgiving of his waning years as it’s hard to be constantly inspired, but yes, he could have been better at editing out the weaker stuff later, mind you, he did get rid of Too Dizzy eventually!

Although much maligned now Let’s Dance was totally inspired, lest we forget everyone was imitating funky or electro Bowie he came back with a broad stroke success and an inspirational sound. Go and dig it out …you may be surprised. Sad I know but I kinda like some of the material on Never let me down ,again it needed editing as there is too much on it and the quality radar was off.q

I agree totally – Lets Dance is a great album, it’s a great commercial album. Bowie’s made great experimental albums but to a lesser degree he can make great commercial albums and Lets dance was a success. I’m not saying it’s up there with his best albums but it is underrated.

I actually think I am A Laser is better than Scream Like A Baby. Ava Cherry has such a presence, and seems literaly dangerous. Especially when she’s talking about her “golden shower”. She could’ve been big.

What the DB version has got that the the Astronettes hasn’t is better musicians and a better ending, and also better lyrics. But still I think I am a laser has more nerve to it. Sorry DB!

I know exactly what you mean, Carl. Even tho I knew only Bowie’s final version for years and years, I now also prefer I Am A Laser. Even though Scream has better lyrics & musicians. But I usually always prefer demo & imperfect versions over polished studio versions, so that’s one of the reasons. Another reason is Ava’s presence, the “it” she adds to the song. And another reason is the sparse arrangement itself, it puts the melody of the song in the foreground, whereas in Scream it’s sort of burried…

I am amazed at the number of people here defending the I Am A Laser lyrics over Scream Like a Baby. Thatt lyric is Bowie at his least oblique and most straightforward, which generally means the lyric is embarrassing. “A heart so big and true?” Really? As for Ava’s golden shower…I don’t personally find the idea of someone urinating to be a daring lyric, just really kind of silly.

Revisionists, apologists, nostalgia fans and kids who think post-punk era was cool because Mum and Dad said so need to know that Gary Numan is not the Godfather of anything let alone electronic music (Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” pre-dates Numan by two years). Credit due he stormed the UK albums/singles chart in July 1979 by unusual means then repeated the same feat a few months later, so with his success being out of the blue he was met with amazement and derision therefore a Bowie-esque novelty act kept afloat by a microscopic but loyal obsessive fanbase. Gary Numan = Flavour of the Month Fluke.

Yeh John, Bowie does rule. David has more talent in his little toe than that third-rate plagiarising money grabbing tax-avoiding self-obsessed musical parasite Numan. It wasn’t that long ago Numan was slagging Bowie off for his lack of output but he was silenced when David put out the amazing “The Next Day”. Sorry I had to get that off my chest. 😀

Numan bangs on about how his career nosedived circa. 1980 like it was a shock to society and had a right to be long term successful. He blames Radio 1, blames negative press, blames it on lack of promotion….wah!wah!….it’s because you’re a clown. keep plagiarizing others Numan and slagging of Bowie because it’s the only way you can sell your buy product to your cult sheep. Good luck with the retro album tours. “I hate nostalgia” my backside.

Some Numan songs are listenable but I just chalk it down to the monkeys and typewriters department. Too many singers and groups like this make their living off of their fans false praises. Numan will always be the man who does cars to many. Bowie has innovation and variety. No contest.

Now of course it’s ‘cool’ for celebrities to say how much they admire Numan pathetic brown nosing freaks. Not so unique now you’re accepted by the rose tinted new generation media mafia are you Mr. Webb?.

Anyway came on to say how much I’m still enjoying Bowie’s next day album still sounds amazing after about 100 listens. ;D

Numan the c*** of the highest order has just been given a Q award well there’s no accounting for taste in the 21st Century or 1979 come to that. Another ego boost to the thin white puke of the adolf hitler memorial space patrol. What an insult to Mr. Bowie.

Just noticed that Alan Moore cited David Bowie as an influence for V for Vendetta. Perhaps it was the general queer droog vibe that he wanted to channel, yet it’s plausible he was inspired by this particular song.

When I listen to side two of Scary Monsters I hear Scream Like a Baby and Kingdom Come as a couplet, a pair of songs that together tell a single story. Scream Like a Baby telling the story of the roundup of the “undesirables” and the beginning of the “reprogramming”. Then “Kingdom Come” tells the story after the reprogramming and vague about whether the story teller is still incarcerated or like Winston Smith in 1984 back in society but under monitoring. (“Up in the tower {guard tower or white tower?} they’re watching me, hoping I’m gonna die – ie –ie”.” )

I was in a bar just after the Fashion single had been released. An obnoxious disco princess went to the jukebox, put on Fashion, and started showing everyone her John Travolta moves. Obviously the song went right over her head. So I went over to the jukebox to see what the B side was: Scream Like A Baby! Perfect! I put my quarter in and cleared the dancefloor in about thirty seconds.